I don't have enough time to list all the terrible reasons to work for this organization. Here's my top 5:
1. You will not be a part of the solution when it comes to educational inequalities, you will be taken advantage of and become part of the problem--I joined ITF because I wanted to help be a part of the solution when it comes to the educational problems in our country and particularly in urban school districts. I left with the realization that Indianapolis Teaching Fellows ACTUALLY takes advantage of these very same children (and their well intentioned fellows) by placing fellows, who have not been sufficiently trained, in the classroom and perpetuating the cycle of poor education.
2. TNTP lies to its fellows and the public by omitting important details such as retention rates. On the first day of training, my cohort (of about 81 people) asked how many fellows had passed training the previous year. We were told that only about 5 people didn't pass. BUT, that number didn't include the 10-15 people who quit because training was so incredibly intense, or the many more people who quit the program after being placed in their schools because they didn't have the support they needed. By the end of my year in the program, we had lost more than half of my cohort. We heard from members of the previous cohort that they had lost an even higher percentage of fellows. HOWEVER, none of these figures appear anywhere on the TNTP website and the folks who run the organization deliberately misconstrue the data seemingly to hide the truth thereby skewing the information in their own favor.
3. I did not receive the kind of coaching and support that I was promised and truly needed. I had to write ALL of my own curriculum from non-existent text books and I think I saw my coach actually IN my classroom 2 times over the course of the entire school year. She was lovely and smart, but spread FAR too thin and couldn't really offer the time I needed to get better at my job.
4. ITF didn't care about my emotional well being at all. I moved to Indianapolis where I knew no one in order to take on this opportunity. The folks at ITF presumably know how difficult teaching can be (most of them have BEEN teachers), especially in your first year and in a failing school and district, yet took no steps to ensure that my emotional health was sound. EVEN AFTER I called my coach to tell her that I needed to go back to a counselor because I was having suicidal thoughts halfway through the year. I found out later that I was not the only person in my cohort having similar problems because of the stress placed on us by the experience. If ITF truly cares about placing competent teachers in urban schools, then they also need to provide some much needed emotional support for the people who have moved away from friends and family to take on the experience.
5. ITF does NOT use the same standards for grading its participant fellows that it expects those same fellows to use when grading their own students. In classes at Marion University, I learned that students should not be graded by taking an average of all grades. The logical reasoning behind this is that students SHOULD get better at a subject as they learn more about it and progress through the semester. Therefore the grades they earn at the end of the semester should be weighted much heavier than the grades at the beginning of the semester. ITF averages ALL grades received by its fellows in evaluations throughout the year. They expected me to grow as a teach over the course of the school year which makes sense. By my scores at the beginning of the school year, when I was new to the unique experiences thrown at me in Indianapolis Public Schools, carried just as much weight as the grades I received at the end of the year when I had gotten much better at my job (thanks to my classes at Marion, but NOT because of anything ITF had done). This caused a HUGE amount of stress throughout the year as I was ALWAYS afraid that my beginning scores would pull my average down and I would not pass the program after spending a year in the hell that was ITF and Indianapolis Public Schools.
I could go on and on. I was one of the few that actually passed the program and was intending on finishing the second year at Marion University. BUT THIS WAS ONLY BECAUSE I AM A STICKLER ABOUT FINISHING THINGS I START. And I didn't actually get the opportunity to finish the second year because I was unexpectedly offered a job at a university and I had to take the opportunity. Although, truth be told, I might have taken ANY opportunity that came along just to get out the hell that I was living. I would HIGHLY advise people NOT to take part in this exploitative and demoralizing experience by joining ITF. I still deal with residual trauma from my year as a fellow.
Our public schools desperately need good, knowledgeable, compassionate, well trained and dedicated teachers. America's youth deserve to learn from the best. However, ITF and TNTP take advantage of the flaws in our system in order to have a say in educational policy by placing thousands of ill-prepared teachers into public schools and by taking tons of money from those same school districts who pay ITF to "train" incoming teaching fellows. If you REALLY want to be a part of something important and change the system from the inside, get your teacher training through a traditional pathway. BOTH YOU AND THE STUDENTS OF AMERICA WILL BE BETTER FOR IT.
